Article out of asahi. Q: What are comfort women? A: Women who were forced to serve as sexual partners of military personnel at comfort stations created under the involvement of the Japanese military during a time of war. A: Besides Japanese who lived in Japan proper, women from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, which were under Japanese colonial rule, were also made to become comfort women. In line with invasions by Japan, comfort stations were also created in China, the Philippines, Burma present-day Myanmar , Malaysia and other areas.
Local women were sent to those comfort stations. In Indonesia, which was under Dutch colonial rule at that time, Indonesian women as well as Dutch women who were living there at the time were made to become comfort women.
However, when the government ratified the treaty in , it exempted its colonies from coverage under the treaty. For that reason, girls who were still minors and not prostitutes in the colonies and occupied areas also became comfort women. There are records of girls as young as 17 in the Korean Peninsula and 14 in Taiwan who became comfort women.
Q: How many comfort women were there? A: Because there are no official records for the total number, there are only various estimates made by researchers. Ikuhiko Hata, a historian of the contemporary period, made an estimate in of between 60, and 90, In , he revised that estimate to about 20, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor of modern and contemporary Japanese history at Chuo University, made an estimate in of between 50, and , Recently, he has revised that figure to more than 50, There are people in South Korea and China who have given much higher figures.
Q: When and how were comfort stations created? According to some records, in order to prevent a heightening of anti-Japanese sentiment, groups of comfort women were invited from Kyushu exclusively for military personnel and civilian workers for the military. Subsequently, other reasons that were given for creating comfort stations were to prevent a decline in war capability due to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases as well as to prevent the leaking of military secrets and to provide comfort to military personnel.
